REVIEW: KnitPro Interchangeables Nickel Plated

Summary:

Lovely needles – easy to work with. Starter pack does represent a good saving on buying the components separately. Only downside is the plastic wallet – quite a cheap feel to it, and not designed to accommodate new tips/cables as you add to your collection.

Detailed review:

Nickel Tips: Nice to work with. Not at all slippy like others have found. Quite the contrary in fact - the stitches feel nice and safe on the needles, and need a bit of a push to move along them. Not much of a push mind you - the stitches move along nice and smoothly. Some have mentioned the tips are cold, but I haven’t found them to be (but I’m used to metal needles anyway)

Cables: Really flexible. Stitches move along the cable easily.

Interchangeability: Great idea and no problems so far. Tips have screwed on to cables without difficulty and the tightening key makes them feel nice and secure. Join between tip and cable is very smooth, with no snagging.

Accessories: Tightening key feels very flimsy, but is probably up for the job – the tips and cables are very fine, so the tightening key needs to be too. I’ve used the short cable with an ender on one end when picking up some dropped stitches, and the enders seemed fine. Not as easy to screw in as the tips though, and I ended up with a slight ‘dip’ between the cable and the ender that some stitches could get caught on. I’m not sure whether this was just because I hadn’t screwed them well enough in. I was in a hurry and didn’t need them ultra secure, so I didn’t bother too much. They were a bit fiddly to unscrew again, but not a major problem.

Storage Wallet: Quite disappointing. Cheap plastic feel to it. The pack has 3 sets of tips, and there are 3 slots for storing tips. As it’s a starter pack, I imagine most people will be intending to add additional tips as they go, so would have expected some spare tip slots to accommodate these. The slots that are there are way wider than required for the tips themselves, so in theory you would be able to put more than 1 set of tips in each slot. I don’t fancy doing that though – too much risk of them scratching each other or getting mixed up. There are 2 front pockets that must be intended for the cables, but they’d need to be coiled quite tightly, and I think I’d prefer to relax them a little during storage. Ultimately, I think I’ll end up making a custom wallet to store them in.
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I bought the Starter set, which has 4, 5 and 6 mm tips, and 60, 80 and 100 cm cables, all in a see through plastic wallet. Each cable pack includes a pair of cable enders and a key for tightening (i.e. the starter pack comes with 6 enders, and 3 tightening keys). I added extra 3mm tips and 150cm cable.

Date purchased: 18 July 2011
Purchased from: Art of Yarn
Last updated: 24 July 2011

Back on track...eventually

Phew! After two weeks of thinking about it, making a mess of it, and having to draft my mum in to help, I'm finally out of my dropped stitch nightmare. In the end, had to rip back about 3 hours worth of knitting, but I reckon I spent double that just trying to retrieve the situation, and failing miserably.

Still, not to worry - it's fixed now and I've been able to get some work done on it today. Managed to get a few rows past where I made the original mistake, and I'm back to enjoying working on it.

Rather frustratingly, my KnitPros still haven't arrived. The shop did say 6-8 days for delivery, and it's still within that timescale, but I want them now!! On top of that, it's a holiday weekend here, so no postal deliveries until Tuesday at the earliest now. Fingers crossed they'll be waiting for me when I get home from work on Tuesday night...

A stitch in time would have saved more than nine...

It's been a frustrating week on the shawl knitting front.

Made a silly, but (what should have been) easily rectifiable mistake at the beginning of a pattern row. And of course, I only realised it at the end of the row! Not to worry, should have been straightforward enough to work back and fix it. Disaster struck though - managed to drop a stitch early on and really messed up trying to pick it up. This happened over a week ago and I'd been dreading going back to it to fix it. I finally bit the bullet on Sunday, and ended up spending the whole day trying to fix it...and it's still not finished! Nearly there, but not quite. I'll be busy most of the week, so it'll probably be the weekend before I can pick it up again.

I'm not going to let it get me down though - I've been really enjoying it, and had been making good progress, so I'm looking forward to getting back on with it.

Got myself a little present to take my mind off of it - ordered a nice shiny set of KnitPro interchangeable needles, nickel plate. I'm hoping they'll arrive at some point this week. I've got a nice little project lined up for them when they arrive. Will need to get my shawl sorted before I start on that one though...

Circular shawl - progress so far

Circular shawl - progress so far, a photo by sandra_mcg on Flickr.

I knew I wasn't going to have as much time to spend on this over the last week. I've probably managed about 6 hours or so. Have managed to get through 1 repeat of the pattern in that time.

This is the first time I've knitted this shawl pattern, but my mum has used it many times over the years and she recommended it as an easy but effective pattern to start off with. She wasn't wrong! The lacy pattern is very simple and easy to memorise.

Knitting's taken over

Haven't made much progress on the Sunshine and Shadow. Since I came back from holiday, all I've wanted to do is knit. This is what I've been working on:

I'm working on the circular version. It's my first shawl, and I'm really enjoying it. That said, it's quite an easy pattern, in comparison with most shawl patterns. It's knitted in 3ply wool on circular wires, with garter stitch in the centre and a simple but effective lace pattern at the edges. I've been able to devote quite a bit of time to it over the last week, so I've made real progress, and have finished the centre. The lacy part's going to take quite a bit more time though - each row has well over 400 stitches, so it takes a while to get through each row. It's also difficult to get photos because there are so many stitches on the wire, so I might have to wait until the end to photograph, rather than taking in progress photos.

Here's the link to the Ravelry page to see the other projects:
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/shawl-pbnc8008

What a difference a week makes!

Wow, I've made some real progress with the Sunshine and Shadow this week.

Last week, I had just finished cutting the fabric into strips. The guidance in the book was to piece all the strips together, join them into a tube, then cut strips across the width of the tube and unpick one of the joins where the edge of the block would be. I gave this a go, but I found it was really difficult to cut the tube of fabric straight, and ended up with some fairly wonky strips. Next time round, I decided to join all the strips into one piece of fabric, but not join together into a tube, then just cut into strips across the full width (slightly awkward, as my mat is only 24" long, while the pieced fabric is about 26" wide, so I can't cut in one go).

Once cut, I stitched the free ends together, to form the tube, and unpicked one seam to form the edge.

I pieced the strips into pairs, then the pairs together to form blocks 4 deep. I'm not going to sew them any bigger than that until I'm ready to piece the whole top.

I'm quite surprised how quickly it's come together. This is how far I've got in a week -

Not quite a quarter of the way yet, but pretty close.

I'm really enjoying working on this. The colours are lovely.

Progress made on a UFO!

This week's been a really productive one - at last!

Picked up a UFO from about 4 years ago, where I had bought all of the fabric, started cutting, then life got in the way, and it got abandonned. This week, I managed to get all of the fabric cut, and make a start on the pieceing.

It's an amish sunshine and shadow inspired by one I saw in the Quilter's Guide to Amish Quilts (the one that's the inspiration is on p36 if you're interested!)

Strips all cut and ready to be pieced.
I just love those solids, and the fact that when put together they are so much more than the sum of their parts. The strips are all 2 inches, so the sqaures should be 1 1/2 inches when pieced. I've realised that in these photos, they're grouped together by colour, this isn't the order they sit in the quilt.

Of course, all this means now is that my Blackford's Beauty now moves from being a WIP to a UFO

The Quilter's Guide to Amish Quilts